All healthcare and welfare organisations are having to deal with new forms of care. This is due to rising demand for care, whilst the number of new staff cannot keep increasing indefinitely.
How can this be resolved? One way to do so is through greater digitalisation. However, adopting these new digital tools is not something that can be achieved overnight. That is why Lifeport Regio Arnhem Nijmegen has launched the ‘Digitaal integraal met impact’ project.
What are healthcare institutions up against?
Here’s an example: a care home occasionally loses track of a resident. It then comes into contact with a company that has developed GPS wristbands for this purpose, which staff can monitor via a specially developed system. The care home purchases these – a substantial investment – and then everyone has to learn how to use them. This causes a great deal of disruption within the organisation and, if you’re not careful, after three years they’ll be gathering dust in a cupboard because they turned out not to be practical after all.Another example: the robot Tessa, which talks to people and helps them structure their day. If someone in day care gets such a tool and is then not allowed to take it to another institution, because the robot comes out of the day care budget, you are back to square one.
Strategic choice and implementation
In short: companies develop digital solutions, but these cannot always be implemented straight away. Sometimes the tool is too expensive, sometimes it doesn’t work for staff, and sometimes parts or batteries are unavailable. If implementation gets bogged down by these kinds of problems, it’s a waste of the money and effort invested.By drawing up a ‘menu’ that enables strategic selection and implementation, this project helps the more than 150 healthcare institutions in our region to implement digital tools. It provides guidance and a method for their successful and rapid implementation.
The menu offers a selection of digital tools, as well as insights into what happens on the shop floor when you implement a tool. What do you need to consider, what training is required, and how do you organise this in advance?
The roadmap consists of four interconnected phases. They are, in order: strategy session, change session, implementation of the change plan, and evaluation session.
The phases are each outlined in terms of objective, target group, approach, result, required expertise and resources to be deployed. In this way, they provide tools to take the next step each time.
Five test cases
The plan: the team behind the ‘Digital Integrated Working’ project will refine the roadmap through discussions with hospital managers and other stakeholders. How do they view developments over the next ten years, how do they see healthcare changing, and how do they intend to respond to these changes?In drawing up the menu, the project naturally also draws on existing research and practical experience. HAN University of Applied Sciences and ROC Nijmegen already possess a wealth of knowledge and experience in this area.
Next, together with five healthcare institutions in the region, the developers of the menu will try out how this method works. With the results of these test cases, they will make another round of improvements and then they will offer the menu card to the other 150 regional healthcare organisations.
Planning
Project coordinator Marc Rinkes will be working from November 2023 to April/May 2024 to set up the project organisation. He is securing funding and selecting the first five healthcare institutions for the pilot.Rinkes explains: “I will first focus on the needs and the ‘level of innovation’ of the organisations involved, healthcare staff and their patients/clients, and residents of neighbourhoods and village centres. I will then match these with the available, validated tools and, based on that, determine what conditions are needed to set up and carry out the test case.”
The project is then set to begin in mid-2024 with the five test cases.
Human Capital Agreement
As part of the Arnhem-Nijmegen region’s Human Capital Agreement, working groups have been set up, including the Working Group on Lifelong Development in Healthcare.Within this working group, a number of participants developed the project: ‘Digital, Integrated and Impactful’.
Participants
Maurice Magnée (HAN),
Marina van der Steenstraten (Rijnijssel-ROC),
Inge Kamphuis and Maartje Peters (Techadopt),
Willem Rutgers (WZW),
Nanda van Zadelhoff (de Liemerije),
Kim Hoeks (Nijmegen City Council),
Ruth Klein (The Economic Board),
Peter Loozen, project leader (Radboudumc)
